Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

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Eric Weinstein proposed something similar back in 2004 (https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/j.1564-913x.2002.tb00238.x). A kind of "migrant dividend." It would align all kinds of currently misaligned economic incentives. No economic policy is costless. Least not migration. Unfortunately most of the costs of high migration are borne by the poor, and most of the benefits are borne by the rich. A migrant dividend would go a LONG way to better distribute the benefits and compensate the poor for downward pressure on wages and working conditions. These dividends would demand employers think long and hard about their real need to employ foreign labour. I suspect they're perfectly capable of finding skilled labour locally. They just want to cut labour costs by hiring H1Bs.

The dividends could be used for a raft of things, including what you've suggested. Alternatively, it could simply be divided by every person in the country and evenly distributed. Dividends, as they offer in Alaska, are very politically popular, and stand a good chance of being legislatively approved.

> No economic policy is costless. Least not migration

As with all of these discussions: what costs? And how does this differ from the costs of children being born and coming of age into the workforce? Should we in fact be enforcing birth, schooling and university quotas to limit the rate at which new humans can enter the skilled workforce?

> As with all of these discussions: what costs?

I'll use one of the most cited papers on migration (https://www.jstor.org/stable/24739100) (part of the text here: https://www.oecd.org/els/38195773.pdf). It's a longitudinal study on Denmark during the period of 1991-2008, exploring the results of a wave of new refugees in the country.

The tl;dr is that low-skilled natives were effectively pushed out of their previous employment. They could not, or would not, compete with the migrants owing to ostensibly lower wages and worse working conditions. Instead, they leveraged Denmark's generous free education system, and earned degrees. This afforded them higher wages over a long period of time.

So, one of the costs of high migration - particularly low-skilled migration - is that the poorest lose their jobs, or earn less, or have to work in worse conditions. If you live in a country without free university education, these people will have to contend with a permanent quality of life downgrade.

Then there is housing. The West has experienced enormous pressure on rental and home prices over the last couple of decades. Part of the reason for this is high migration. People need to live somewhere. In many places, for various reasons, production has not kept up. This means locals are forced to pay more for accommodation. This, once again, disproportionately impacts the poor.

I also cite demand for social services and infrastructure, which also appears to be failing to expand at sufficient pace in many nations.

> And how does this differ from the costs of children being born and coming of age into the workforce? Should we in fact be enforcing birth, schooling and university quotas to limit the rate at which new humans can enter the skilled workforce?

Your question implies no distinction between locals and immigrants. That is clearly incorrect. A nation exists to protect the wellbeing of its citizens, not citizens of other nations.

>No economic policy is costless.

There exist Pareto optimal economic policies.

Yes but the costs and benefits are not evenly distributed.

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